Static type systems are the world’s most widely applied formal method, in daily use by millions of programmers.

The trouble is that weak type systems give types a bad name; they get in your way and stop you from writing the programs you want to write. And that leads to the familiar but fruitless static-vs-dynamic debate which I hope to avoid entirely.

Adventures with types

Simon Peyton Jones, MA, MBCS, CEng, graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. Simon was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages.